Peter Hitchens, simply the best columnist in Britain (although Christopher Booker is close) and one of the only reporters to notice why the EU chose Ventotene for their summit on Brexit.

Hitchens today:""I already knew this, as I am interested in what happened to Western Europe’s Communists after they gave up on the Soviet Union, but how many of you grasped the significance of the location of the Mediterranean EU summit, the bleak island of Ventotene, used by Mussolini as a prison for his opponents?

It was a homage to the Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli, one of the original designers of the EU utopia.

Yet his original politics are either not known to, or never mentioned by, most mainstream, reporters. Why would that be?

No one is more hostile to the EU than Communists are. Some people are equally so. But no one is more so, and practically no one on the Right has been so for as long. If Hitchens and Booker really believe any of this, then they are simply out of their depth.

Spinelli left the Communist Party in 1937, when he was 30. He did not die until he was 78. He had been out of the party for four years by the time of the Ventotene Manifesto, which in any case does not awfully much resemble the EU.

Hitchens's claim that Western European Communists became European federalists after the Soviet Union collapsed is wrong, not only in that they didn't, but in Spinelli's case in that he died in 1986, while the Soviet Union still existed.

Western Marxism and Eurocommunism, neither of them keen on the EU (to put it mildly), were not responses to the collapse of the USSR. The first, in particular, was barely younger than it was. Gramsci, after all, died as long ago as 1937, the year that Spinelli left the Communist Party, never to return.

Hitchens says of the leading Leave campaigners: "Al ‘Boris’ Johnson is now a member of Chairman May’s politburo, her creature, existing at her whim and committed to make any failure look like a success. Michael Gove is, I am told, growing a beard. Gisela Stuart has vanished into the jungle of Labour’s civil war. Andrea Leadsom has been swallowed up. As for David Davis, the only real shark in Chairman May’s lagoon, he is mainly occupied fending off his rivals, Liam Fox and Al Johnson." But he declines to mention that Kelvin Hopkins, who chaired Labour Leave, has since been appointed to the Shadow Cabinet.

Altiero Spinelli? Bloody hell, this is an erudite blog! But Booker, in comic character as a Colonel Blimp, is pretending to see Reds under the bed with this one. And Hitchens, an old Trot, possibly thinks they are really there. The Ventotene Manifesto? You must be one of very few people who've ever read that. I bet neither of them ever has. A fascinating historical curiosity that never had any impact on anything. Like Christopher Booker or Peter Hitchens.